Juliana Huxtable: Live in Performance

The iconic Juliana Huxtable is an American artist, writer, performer, and musician. Exploring the intersections of race, gender, queerness, technology, and identity, Huxtable uses a diverse set of means to engage these issues, including self-portraiture, text-based prints, performance, nightlife, music, writing, and social media. Huxtable references her own body and history as a transgender African American woman as she challenges the socio-political and cultural forces that inform normative conceptions of gender and sexuality.

Huxtable will present a new iteration of her performance work, which highlights her compelling use of language, as well as her collaborations in music, projection and lighting design. The production features her frequent collaborators Joe Heffernan - the pianist, percussionist, and composer - and Detroit-based harpist Ahya Simone. Michael Potvin is the lighting designer. Her performance marks Michigan Social Work’s first commissioned artist in over 20 years and is a part of the Social Justice Art Collection.

Huxtable’s work is also included in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s presentation of “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today” on view from December 17, 2018 to April 7, 2019. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the exhibition examines the radical

impact of internet culture on visual art since the invention of the web in 1989. This exhibition presents more than forty works across a variety of media—painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects. It features work by some of the most important artists working today including Judith Barry, Juliana Huxtable, Pierre Huyghe, Josh Kline, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Cindy Sherman, Frances Stark, and Martine Syms.

Huxtable will also give a Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Lecture at 5:15 PM on February 7, 2018 at the Michigan Theater.

Major funding was provided by The Faculty Alliance for Diversity at the University of Michigan School of Social Work.

Cosponsors: The Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and The Spectrum Center.